


Blood Bond

by Tarlan



Category: Blade (Movie Series)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Community: hc_bingo, Community: smallfandomfest, M/M, Trope Bingo Round 5, Violence, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/pseuds/Tarlan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After surviving enslavement by Danica and years of vampire hunting, he never expected to die like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Bond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Casey_Wolfe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casey_Wolfe/gifts).



> Death of a major character - not Drake or Hannibal. Zombies. Extreme violence and gore.
> 
> For **smallfandomfest** Fest 17  
>  **hc_bingo** Round 6: fever/delirium  
>  **trope_bingo** Round 5: deathfic
> 
>  
> 
> **If you want to know the major character death before reading the story then please see END NOTES**

The Daystar virus was supposed to have been fully tested to have no impact on humans, only on vampires, but he guessed testing could only go so far when the main ingredient for activating it was missing during those tests: Drake's and Blade's blood. It had worked beautifully at first and Hannibal had watched with a certain amount of satisfaction when Danica turned to dust right before his eyes. If ever a creature had deserved a permanent death then that person was Danica Talos, if only for the years of misery he had endured as her pet.

However, the virus mutated once it came into contact with both Drake and Blade's DNA.

The first sign of something wrong had come a week after they believed both Drake and Blade were dead. The authorities had taken away the only remaining body in the small crater left behind in Danica's headquarters - that of Blade's - and like the others, Hannibal had assumed Drake had turned to dust like the rest of his vampire race.

Blade had awoken in the morgue and attacked the orderlies, biting them but leaving them alive, except maybe it would have been kinder if he had killed them outright. Instead they'd gone home to their wives and families with a handful of antibiotics to calm a fever - and days later they had turned into something more terrible than any vampire. Something ravenous for human flesh and blood.

Hannibal couldn't believe it. He'd survived years fighting vampires and other strange night creatures. He'd survived Abby's monthly cycle of terror, worse than any werewolf baying for blood at a full moon. He thought all he had left now was mop up duty, taking care of the vamps that were fleeing to other cities to escape the virus. Not that they'd be safe for long as the virus had spread across the world in just a few weeks, carried on the wind.

Zombies.

The ones bitten by Blade had died and come back to life, attacking... well more like eating their own families. Fever and delirium came after a bite, always followed by death and reanimation. He'd heard not one single report of someone surviving a zombie bite... and so the cycle went on exponentially. Two zombies became four, then eight, twenty, a hundred, and then more. By now they numbered in the hundred thousands around the world.

The street below was teeming with them,and though they seemed to stumble around for the most part, as soon as they smelled blood or a prospective meal on legs, they moved faster. He watched as a man and woman ran the gauntlet, knowing he could do nothing to save them from this distance. Hell, he'd have had a hard time saving them at street level as there were simply too many flesh-eating zombies. He cursed when several of the zombies dropped fully dead with arrows through their skulls.

"Abby," he snarled.

She never listened to him, always needing to be the heroine as if she had something to prove just because she was Whistler's daughter. He tried to make out her position and snarled again when he saw her. She was perilously close to the street where more zombies were appearing from doorways and falling through broken windows, even some several floors up, in their single-minded focus on fresh meat. He watched the ones with snapped limbs from their falls dragging their broken bodies after the rest of the zombie herd.

Hannibal looked away as the couple were surrounded, falling beneath a mass of the ravenous creatures, their screams cutting off as the zombies tore out their throats and feasted upon their innards. A clink of tiles made him glance across the rooftop warily in case the zombies had sensed him waiting up here, and he could swear he saw someone strangely familiar but they moved too quickly. Certainly too quickly for one of the lumbering zombies, even for one focused on him as a ready-meal, or for a normal human. Only one possibility remained but all the vampires in New York were long turned to dust.

Another clink had him looking in another direction, sword ready in his hand, and he sighed when Abby reached him.

"You were right. It was foolish to try to save them," she stated, and Hannibal frowned at the pained look in her eyes.

"Abby?"

Then he saw it, the tattered material hanging from the back of her shoulder. Blood flowed from where a zombie had torn away a mouthful of flesh.

"No," he stated, refusing to believe she'd been bitten. "Tell me it was a rabid dog," he begged.

"Hannibal..." Her face creased up in pain and sorrow. "I'm so sorry."

There was no cure. No fucking cure, and no Sommerfield to figure out where she'd gone wrong and create one.

"We'll head back to the boat. Go through Sommerfield's notes. See if we missed something."

She grabbed at his arm as he made to leave, expecting her to follow.

"I can't. I can't put you, Zoe, and the others in danger. I'm sorry."

Before he could parse her meaning, she pulled a gun and fired, the back of her head exploding as the bullet went from under her chin straight through her brain.

"NO!" 

The shot reverberated along with his scream of denial, and he dropped to his knees, grabbing up her body and holding it tight to his chest, uselessly trying to staunch the flow of blood and hold in what was left of her brains. Time seemed to stand still for him, awareness returning only when something latched onto Abby's foot and began to drag her away.

Zombies.

The instinctual, survivalist part of his brain tried to claw around the shock but Hannibal felt rage filling him as a zombie took a bite out of Abby's calf, tearing into sinew and muscle. He yelled angrily. It looked up and Hannibal shot it between the eyes, but another had reached them and more were behind it, drawn by the sound of gunfire and shouting, by the scent of fresh blood. One of them grabbed for him and he twisted away from it without losing his grip on Abby's body. Hands grabbed for him and his fingers found one of Abby's arrows, shoving it straight through the once-human eye socket. Confusion hit him when another of the zombies dropped fully dead, its head separated from its body, then another was decapitated with inhuman speed.

He fought as he was dragged away from Abby's corpse by someone inhumanly strong, wanting to bite down on the hand covering his mouth as the zombies turned their attention to Abby's body. His last sight of her was one that would haunt him forever and his only comfort right then was the knowledge that she was already dead long before they tore her apart.

When he came to his senses he was on another roof top several blocks away and he scrabbled away on his ass to fetch up against the parapet when he saw his unwanted savior.

"Drake. But you're... you're..."

Drake raised his eyebrows and the word 'dead' died in his throat because Drake was the vampire king who had died millennia ago. Once the shock of Drake's presence had passed, the memory of Abby returned. He shook off the hand that pressed down between his shoulder blades but let his head drop between his raised knees anyway as his senses swam, lightheaded from shock. He should have feared Drake but if Drake had wanted him dead then he would have left him to get torn apart by zombies.

"Why?" he asked, voice muffled, but he knew vampire hearing was far keener than human.

Drake was crouched down beside him in his preferred human form but he ignored Hannibal's question.

"You were bitten," he stated, and Hannibal blinked.

Shock had kept him unaware of the pain in his forearm but he raised his head now and gaped at the savage wound before looking up into Drake's strangely compassionate eyes. he could already feel the fever growing, burning inside him as the mutated vampire virus crawled through his veins.

"Can this day get any worse?" He quipped, closing his eyes. After all he had survived at Danica's hands, and fighting vampires since gaining his freedom, he had never expected to die in a goddamn zombie apocalypse. He opened them immediately. "I take it back," he stated quickly because he didn't want to pose a challenge to some higher being listening in on his pain and grief.

It wasn't quick enough for between one second and the next Drake was on him, teeth sinking into his vulnerable throat, draining him to the point of death. Hanging on the edge of life, memories of Danica returned, and he tried to curse Drake, tried to goad him into killing him outright but the bastard opened the vein in his own neck and pushed Hannibal's mouth against the tear, forcing the blood into his mouth. He fought against it at first, tried not to swallow but his body was in shock from blood loss, dying, and survival instincts kicked in once more. He didn't want this, didn't want to become a plaything once more, a toy to be used and abused, and he sobbed as he felt Drake's blood trickle down his throat.

His body succumbed to exhaustion as the transformation took place and when he next opened his eyes Hannibal was surprised to find himself lying on a clean, dry bed with the sun on his face. Before he could convince himself that it had all been a terrible nightmare, or delirium brought on by the zombie bite, Drake settled onto the mattress edge beside him, watching him closely as Hannibal took stock of himself.

"I don't understand," Hannibal murmured, because he didn't feel like a vampire, and yet he didn't feel human either.

The desire for blood was there but it wasn't the raging thirst he'd experienced after Danica turned him, and the sun was warming his skin rather than turning him to dust. Of all the things he'd missed after Danica made him her boy-toy, the warmth of the sun on his skin was the greatest loss.

"I could not allow you to perish."

"So you turned me?" Hannibal could feel his outrage building because he did not want this, not after what Danica had done to him.

Yet he could not deny he felt different this time. More alive despite technically being dead, and he still had the sun. He was a daywalker like Blade... like Drake.

A hand cupped his face, an agile thumb stroking along the line of his well-trimmed beard to his chin before lifting slightly to brush over his lips. He felt it then, the heat of desire coiling up from deep inside him, warming his blood. When Drake leaned in to kiss him, he closed the gap, unable to resist the call of his mind and body to the vampire who had sired him. Yet even this did not feel the same as it had with Danica. Then he'd had no control at all, like a puppet with Danica pulling the strings, but here and now he could feel he had a choice. He could pull away from Drake. He could walk away freely.

Thoughts of Abby came crashing down but instead of pulling away, Hannibal pushed in closer, burying himself against Drake's shoulder as his grief was accepted. Strong male arms wrapped around him, holding him tight. Danica's lust for power and control had extended into the bedroom too so he was no stranger to a man's touch, preferring it to a woman's after years of cruel treatment from Danica. He craved it now.

Where Danica had given only physical pain and mental anguish, Hannibal felt a reflection of his grief from Drake, as if Drake was sharing his pain to lessen the burden on him, to comfort him. It was his undoing, finding solace after years spent alone, using quips and sarcasm to keep others at arms' length. He bowed beneath the onslaught of what he could only describe as tenderness, and love, giving himself freely to Drake.

By the time the sun set that evening, Hannibal felt as if he had gone to Hell and back. He had shared everything with Drake - all the pain of those years of slavery, all the loneliness in the years that followed - and in return he was refused nothing, his mind and body comforted in all ways. He felt sated and accepted, wanted and loved. His grief was still raw but now it was manageable, and with it came a reminder that the others would not know of Abby's fate.... or his.

He couldn't simply abandon them, but he couldn't return to them either. Not as a vampire.

"I have seen this plague before," Drake said quietly, stroking over Hannibal's naked skin from shoulder to ass. The rumble of his voice was strangely comforting. "These undead creatures are spawned from the Daywalker. Yet, like others of our kind they are linked by the blood of their sire."

"Blade."

"Yes."

Hannibal pushed up to seated, looking down at Drake who remained sprawled naked on the bed. His perfect body distracted Hannibal for a moment, until he shook his head to clear his thoughts.

"So if we want to stop the zombies, we need to kill Blade."

"Yes."

Hannibal climbed out of the bed and paced the room, momentarily lost in thought as he recalled the reluctant ally in their fight against the Talos siblings and Drake. Blade had always teetered on the edge of sanity, needing more and more of Whistler's serum to hold back the blood lust. Since being infected by the Daystar virus, he had lost all control, killing indiscriminately and siring more zombies in the process. In just a few weeks the zombie plague had spread all along the eastern seaboard from New York up to the Canadian border and down south into Florida. It was moving west too as people fled from the cities, unable to leave bitten relatives or friends behind. It had carried across the globe on airplanes, infecting cities in every continent.

Even with every bullet and arrow at his disposal Hannibal knew it would be an impossible task to destroy every infected person or zombie on the planet. If Drake was speaking the truth - and he had no reason to lie - he wouldn't need to. Killing the source was the only option.

"Then what are we waiting for?"

"Rabid in his desire for blood, Blade has followed the herds of frightened humans fleeing west."

"Of course he has," Hannibal murmured. "I need to do something before we go after him. I need to make sure the others are safe."

"As you wish."

Hannibal blinked in surprise for he hadn't expected Drake to agree to his request. He noticed Drake's lips quirk into a smile as Drake pushed up from the bed and stalked toward him, gloriously nude. He cupped Hannibal's cheek again.

"The others corrupted the blood bonds, and each generation grew weaker until they were nothing but parasites. Weak of mind and body." He leaned in to kiss Hannibal tenderly. "This is the true bond that I long denied for myself. Not sire to child but one bonded to another in all ways. There is no master and slave in this union. We meet as equals. You are mine, Hannibal King, and I am yours."

Hannibal could feel the words singing in his blood and knew beyond a shadow of doubt that Drake was speaking the truth.

Within an hour they had all they needed and were on their way. It was hard telling the others of Abby's death, harder still to reveal his transformation and walk away. They had spent too long fighting vampires to readily accept him and Drake so he did his best to fortify their position. The best he could do for the people he cared about was end this zombie apocalypse.

His natural optimism buoyed him as he moved off into the night, heading west. With Drake by his side Blade didn't stand a chance, and then he would have all the time in the world to explore this blood bond singing between them.

END

 

**Author's Note:**

> Character death: Abigail Whistler


End file.
